by Cindi Branham
This is an opinion column. There’s a “new” threat, a new reason to fear for the dissolution of the American experiment. It’s called Project 2025, and it will have a negative effect on all of us and our families, friends and descendants and on the fabric of our daily lives.
Actor Taraji P. Henson recently said, “It’s not a game. Look it up!”
It’s been in the works for decades. The project’s goal is to win the November 5, 2024 election, and to begin implementation November 6. That’s if Trump wins, and the Democratic candidate doesn’t win by a wide, less questionable margin. We know the Right will immediately deny the election results if the victory isn’t Trump’s.
Its threat lies in the concept that if you aren’t a White, Christian, conservative male, we will see the rights we have currently begin to dissolve. All our rights: not theirs. We will see the fabric of our nation dissolve.
Christian Nationalism isn’t the same as Christianity, but it will be the exclusive religion.
This time around, life won’t go on as usual if Trump wins the election.
Project 2025 is a product of the Heritage Foundation, a powerful, conservative Christian nationalist organization who will use this as a blueprint to turn our country into one that serves only those who’ve created this plan – those White, Christian males – to keep them in power even as a minority. Even the women within their circles will be reduced to complete subserviency.
To this end, Heritage has been interviewing individuals to be ready to put in place beginning January 20, 2025, if Trump is inaugurated then. Of the 200,000 they seek, they’re rumored to be over 50,000 to date.
Areas of our society that Project 2025 targets include, at a minimum:
•Education
•Abortion and Women’s Rights
•Government and Government Services
•Healthcare
•Taxes
•Racial and Voting Rights
•LGBTQ Rights
•Foreign Aid
•Religious Freedom
It’s going to take more than this one column to consider how each area will affect your life; your kitchen table. This will be a series of 4 – 5 columns, addressing how our lives will be affected.
The Heritage Foundation isn’t keeping any of this a secret, as you’ll see at www.project2025.org. The plan is a 900-page document outlining the next presidential transition, with a focus on bringing more government under the president and pulling rights away from women, persons of color, members of the LGBTQ community, non-Christians, and more.
Picture this if you will (the introduction of “The Twilight Zone” metaphor is intentional):
Your Medicare no longer exists; it’s been replaced by a private insurance company, and every treatment, surgery, or prescription approval takes weeks or months. Your insulin cost $35 a month in 2024 and now costs over $2000 a month because President Biden’s drug negotiations were removed by executive order on day one of Trump’s second term.
Obamacare has been repealed, and your family and community are forced to pay significantly more for insurance or go without. Their first medical emergency puts them into bankruptcy, they lose their home and have nowhere to turn because everyone in their family and circles are in the same boat.
The poorer among us fall off of Medicaid due to drastic cuts to the program.
These are all caused – and promised – by Project 2025.
Project 2025 will replace 50,000 upper and middle level managers will be swiftly replaced, and Redstone and Marshall will be affected. Control of all federal agencies will be pulled under Trump. Qualifications be damned; loyalty will be the only qualification.
These federal agencies will exist and function solely to do the bidding of President/Dictator Trump, for the benefit of himself and the benefit of the new class of oligarchs. Not the Americans they’ve served and uplifted over the history of our country.
How do we counteract such a well-developed and well-funded attack on our democracy and members of America’s melting pot?
I go to former President Obama’s line, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
We’re the only ones who can counteract this effort. Without money, and without a huge national network, we must pledge to vote and to put physical work into turning out our voters. We phonebank into swing states from our homes. We volunteer to travel to those states as we’re able and knock on the doors of Democratic and Independent voters to help them understand how important it is for them to exercise their right to vote on November 5th.
How do we resist this challenge, probably the greatest we’ve faced in our lifetimes? We don’t succumb to fear and inaction, misinformation and manipulation, the desired results of the Right. Resist is what we’ve done successfully over the last 8 years.
That’s partly due to drastic societal changes since Trump took office, including the overturning of Roe v Wade and the mishandling of the COVID epidemic, we’ve come together to deny Republicans wins in most elections since, even when conventional wisdom said they should win: 2018, 2020, 2022, and nearly every special election in the interim.
Democratic candidates won even when they “shouldn’t have.”
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
Time and time again, it’s always been us.
